“
André Breton in Prague!” announced the Czech Surrealist flyers. Breton and
his fellow founder of French surrealism, Paul Éluard, arrived in the city on
March 27, 1935. It had not been easy for their hosts, the Czech Surrealists
Vítěslav Nezval and Karel Teige, to arrange their visit: no one had any
money. Breton and Éluard were famous but poor. Nezval was determined. Two
years earlier, on May 9, 1933, he had met Breton for the first time at the
Café de la Place Blanche in Paris. Derek Sayer’s 600-page book hinges on
this encounter.

For Breton, who had read Freud at an impressionable age, Surrealism was
“psychic automatism in its pure state”. It aspired to delve into the
unconscious, reaching towards what was behind, underneath, concealed. This
aspiration did not, however, stop the Surrealists from declaring their
affection for Marx, Freud’s great competitor in diagnosing the misery of
modern man. Breton and Éluard joined the French Communist Party in 1927. Not
long afterwards Stalin came to power in the USSR, and Breton began to have
doubts. He and Éluard met Nezval near the time of their expulsion from the
French Communist Party, when they had already begun to suspect that “the
present regime of Soviet Russia . . . is turning into the very negation of
what it should be”.

Nezval, who had joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1924, was
certain that Surrealism and dialectical materialism were naturally part of a
whole. In a letter dated the day after their first meeting at the Café de la
Place Blanche, he wrote to Breton,

“If the materialist dialectic enables both of us not to see any lasting
conflict between reality and surreality, content and form, conscious and
unconscious, activity and dream, if we both do not see any absolute
contradiction between evolution and revolution, invention and tradition,
adventure and order, necessity and chance, why should we continue without
closer cooperation with surrealism, which was the first of the world’s
avant-gardes to discover, in the most classical fashion, the point at which
these contradictions can be dialectically unified – the idea of surreality?”

In March 1935, the Czech Surrealists – who included the architect-designer
Teige, the poet Konstantin Biebl, the painters Toyen (Marie Čermínová) and
Jindřich Štyrský, and the literary critic Záviš Kalandra – were still
Communists in good standing. At issue during the Prague visit was nothing
less than the compatibility of Surrealism and the Revolution – that is, art
and life. In his Prague lecture, “The Political Position of Today’s Art”,
Breton agonized about the seemingly irreconcilable imperatives of artistic
freedom and political engagement. “Either [artists] must give up
interpreting and expressing the world in the ways that each of them finds
the secret of within himself and himself alone – it is his very chance of
enduring that is at stake –”, Breton told his Czech audience, “or they must
give up collaborating on the practical plan of action for changing this
world.” The impossible “choice between these two abdications” would haunt
the French and Czech Surrealists alike.

Unlike in France, the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia seemed, wondrously
enough, to understand the Surrealists. After all, the critic Kalandra was
both a member of the Surrealist group and a Communist Party journalist. He
praised the French visitors for “not wanting to degrade their poetic
activity to . . . agitational doggerel”, and defended Breton in his review
of the latter’s book Communicating Vessels:

“The Marxist critics who condemn surrealism [would] be right if in his study
André Breton had separated the human individual in his “eternal”
subjectivity from the historically and class conditioned individual in his
process of ceaseless social change. But Breton never made these mistakes. On
the contrary: Communicating Vessels – this is the fundamental thesis of the
book.”

Éluard’s friend, the German Surrealist painter Max Ernst, described Surrealist
collage as “the coupling of two realities which apparently cannot be coupled
on a plane which apparently is not appropriate to them”. Prague was Breton’s
and Éluard’s fantasy of the coupling of Communist and Surrealist realities.
The Czechoslovak capital, Sayer writes, “seemed to offer a dissection table
upon which these seeming antinomies could make love”. To his former wife
Gala, Éluard wrote from Prague: “Our photos in the magazines, the laudatory
articles in the Communist newspapers, the interviews, I believe that for us
Prague is the gate to Moscow”.

Unlike in France, the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia seemed, wondrously
enough, to understand the Surrealists

It was an ecstatic encounter. The Czech poets fell in love with the French
poets – and miraculously for the Czechs, that love was reciprocated. Éluard
told Nezval that Paris seemed cold and sad after his time in Prague. Breton
wrote that he had taken from Prague the most beautiful memories of his life.
He wanted Nezval to know that “you have acquired me completely, that for you
I am willing to do everything, that you are my best friends”. The sentiments
were mutual. “No feeling”, Nezval told Breton, “has seemed to me so
valuable, so sublime as the thought that I can call you my adored friend.”
In a letter to Éluard (not cited by Sayer), Nezval enclosed some of his
poems in literal French translation: “Dear friend, that these lines have
been permitted to find themselves before your eyes has already justified my
entire life . . . . I love you. We all love you”.

Nezval represented what was already the third generation of Czech modernists.
In the 1890s, Czech modernism had emerged as a revolt against mechanistic
positivism and as a call for individualism in an age of nation-building. “We
want truth in art”, proclaimed the Manifesto of Czech Modernism (1895), “not
truth that is a photograph of exterior things, but honest, interior truth.”
This was before Czechoslovakia existed, when the Czech lands were the
possession of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire. Throughout the
nineteenth century, against the Germanizing pressures of Vienna, patriotic
“awakeners” revived the Czech language and the memory of a lovely, even
glorious Czech past. Though they themselves tended to speak German better
than Czech, the “awakeners” wrote dictionaries, historical chronicles and an
encyclopedia that, in Sayer’s description, “did much to narrate into being
that which it purported merely to document”. “A nation that cannot take
itself for granted”, Milan Kundera called the Czechs. The first-generation
modernists felt more secure: “We have come so far as a nation that no power
on earth could wrest it away from us”. Their subjectivist turn inwards,
Thomas Ort emphasizes in Art and Life in Modernist Prague, was a free
choice: it was not driven by marginality.

The second modernist generation – Karel Čapek’s – shared with the first a
refusal to see a contradiction between patriotism and cosmopolitan
Francophilia. The point of departure from the generation of the 1890s came
in 1911, with Cubism; the split turned on the art–life question. Čapek, his
brother Josef, and their circle of friends also rejected mechanism and
positivism, while reacting against what they perceived as self-absorbed
aestheticism and a negative attitude to life. Ort describes what it was
about the first-generation modernists that Čapek so disliked: “In their
imagination, life was short, brutal and mediocre, whereas art was the realm
of the eternal, the beautiful, and the harmonious”.

Čapek’s double rebellion against positivism and aestheticism was an
affirmation of the world. Cubism for him was, in Ort’s description, “not
withdrawal from the world into a shelter of private, subjective space, but a
form of engagement with the world that acknowledged the subjective
constitution of its order”. Unlike contemporary Viennese Expressionists, Čapek
and his friends felt no compulsion to retreat into a private garden. A
second Parisian inspiration was the philosopher Henri Bergson, from whom Čapek
took “vitalism” – the “élan vital” as a life force stronger than individual
lives – and the distinction between intellect and intuition. Intellect
analysed objects into static, separable components; it was, in Bergson’s
words, mechanical, “at ease only in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in
the dead”. “The intellect”, Bergson famously wrote in Creative Evolution,
“is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life.” In contrast,
intuition grasped the world internally, directly, holistically. It led us
“to the very inwardness of life”.

Then came the First World War, which, Čapek said, “made nothing out of
mankind”. He retreated from collectivism and vitalism, from an idea of
“life” that was larger than individual lives. Afterwards he argued for a
synthesis of objectivity and subjectivity, and for the use of intuition to
achieve empathy for perspectives different from one’s own. The war had
persuaded him of the provisional nature of all truth. The human condition
was one of irreducible pluralism and conflicting values; the negotiation of
these, he believed, would always end in something less than perfection. The
paradox – and this is Ort’s central point – is that precisely this (gently)
subjectivist critique of reason led Čapek to defend liberalism. What
was radical about him was his moderation in an age of extremity.

It was an ecstatic encounter

During the First World War, in a gesture of solidarity with France, Čapek
translated into Czech Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Zone”, one stanza of
which is set in Prague:

“The hands on the clock in the Jewish Quarter run backwards
And you too go backwards in your life slowly
Climbing Hradčany in the evening listening
In the pubs the singing of Czech songs . . . ”

Sayer’s and Ort’s stories meet in this poem. Sayer agrees with Milan Kundera:
the poems of Nezval and other young avant-gardists would have been
“inconceivable” without Čapek’s translation of “Zone”. It was Apollinaire –
“the great Apollinaire, without whom there would be no poetry of the
twentieth century”, Nezval wrote – who formed this third generation of Czech
modernists.

Karel Čapek was born in 1890. He did not fight in the First World War only
because the Austrian army rejected him on medical grounds. His friends
fought and died. Nezval and Teige were born in 1900. Their adult lives began
as the war ended. For them, the war was an absolute break. “Our age has been
split into two”, read the founding statement (1920) of the avant-garde group
Devětsil. “Behind us are left the old times, condemned to being turned into
dust in libraries; before us sparkles a new day.” The time of decadence and
individualism had passed. Devětsil was explicitly collectivist, and aspired
to wholeness. Čapek had given up on that. Devětsil’s “Poetism” – “above all,
a way of life”, in Teige’s description – called for life and art to merge.
Čapek refused. To dissolve that boundary, he believed, would be to
relinquish the autonomy of art. The Devětsil artists were optimistic
absolutists who joined the revolution. Čapek was against Communism – because
he was against the certainty of faith. The limits of reason, he believed,
made faith impossible.

Devětsil, having passed through Primitivism, Constructivism, Poetism and other
isms, dissolved itself in 1931 – into Surrealism. By now the context had
changed. Stalin had come to power, and the Russian Futurist Vladimir
Mayakovsky had committed suicide, leaving behind the lines: “the love boat /
shattered against the everyday”. The 1920s were giving way to the 1930s.
Playtime was over.

This is where Sayer’s story begins – although one hesitates to say so with too
much certainty. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Sayer
constructs a montage from petites narratives. “I am not interested in the
grand narratives that discipline”, he explains, “so much as the details that
derail.” Sayer’s book is a pleasure to read, luscious in a sultry kind of
way. (“We may picture Čapek”, he writes, “as Hugo Boettinger once
caricatured him, hair brilliantined back, cigarette holder between his lips,
every inch the urbane intellectual, but Karel liked to get some dirt under
those elegantly manicured nails.”) Thomas Ort is a pleasure to read for
other reasons: his writing is lucid and unpretentious. These two books about
Czech modernism – about what Paris meant for Prague – are alter egos of
sorts: Ort’s earnestness contrasts with Sayer’s sarcasm. Ort’s chapters are
chronological; Sayer’s temporality is slippery. Ort’s story is driven by the
history of ideas, Sayer’s by “hasard objectif” (“objective chance”, as the
Surrealists liked to say) and Kundera’s “destiny of unexpected encounters”.
Sayer meanders voyeuristically into the affairs between Franz Kafka and
Milena Jesenská, Alma Mahler and Oskar Kokoschka, Leoš Janáček and Kamila
Stösslová, and tarries alongside the ménage à trois of Éluard, Gala, and Max
Ernst. The Vogue model turned photographer Lee Miller makes an appearance,
as do the singer Jarmila Novotná, the architect Le Corbusier, the “little
girl conductor” Vítěslava Kaprálová, and the Nazi filmmaker Leni
Riefenstahl. The axis is Prague–Paris, but we detour to Vienna for
Expressionism, Berlin for Dada, the Moravian town of Zlín for the Bata shoe
factory.

While Sayer lingers at length among Surrealist erotica, he disapproves of the
Surrealists’ “propensity to parlay the sordid into the sublime”. Prague
itself – krásná Praha, zlatá Praha (beautiful Prague, golden Prague) – has
long been eroticized, but Sayer finds the city’s sexualization tawdry. For
him, Prague is the laboratory where Éluard’s belief that “everything is
transmutable into everything” is confirmed. “This little mother has claws”,
as Kafka wrote of his own city. The fairy-tale picture of the castle
overlooking the river conceals the necrophiliac and the sadomasochistic, and
images of the pre-modern grotesque flicker across Sayer’s Surrealist
narrative: in 1621, just before the execution of Prague University’s rector,
Jan Jesenský, on Old Town Square, Jesenský’s tongue was cut out and nailed
to the scaffold. If for Benjamin Paris was the capital of the nineteenth
century, for Sayer Prague was the capital of the twentieth: “Prague is a
less glittering capital for a century, to be sure, than la ville-lumière,
but then it was a very much darker century”.

The lone – and vastly imperfect – hero that slowly emerges from this narrative
is Breton. Breton’s reservations (not devoid of homophobia) about unbridled
eroticism are paralleled in his reservations about the Soviet experiment.
All of Breton’s great friendships – with Louis Aragon, with Nezval, with
Éluard – eventually shattered against Stalinism. As he said in defence of
the darkly grotesque aesthetic that dominated the Exposition internationale
du Surréalisme (1938): “We did not deliberately create that atmosphere: it
merely conveyed the acute sense of foreboding with which we anticipated the
coming decade”.

In fact, it was the more cheerful Čapek, the unambiguous hero of Art and
Life in Modernist Prague, whose “acute sense of foreboding” was most
prescient. In 1936 he published the apocalyptic War with the Newts, a tale
of the world’s takeover by hideous salamanders. At the novel’s end, the
overpowered world leaders gather for a conference:

The 1920s were giving way to the 1930s. Playtime was over

“In a somewhat depressed atmosphere another proposal was put on the
agenda: that Central China be yielded to the salamanders for inundation. In
return the Newts would undertake to guarantee in perpetuity the coasts of
the European states and their colonies. . . . The Chinese delegate was given
the floor, but unfortunately nobody understood what he was saying.”

Two years later, in September 1938 in Munich, the French and British prime
ministers Édouard Daladier and Neville Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia
to appease Adolf Hitler. Thus did Čapek’s love for liberalism – and France –
end as badly as the Surrealists’ infatuation with Communist revolution. He
died a few months later, at the age of forty-eight. “He just stopped
breathing and he just stopped living”, Milena Jesenská wrote. “If you like,
you believe that he died of bronchitis and pneumonia.”

Isaiah Berlin argued that what distinguished the nineteenth-century Russian
intelligentsia was its extraordinary receptiveness to a certain kind of
Enlightenment-turned-Romantic philosophy. Both Sayer and Ort make an
analogous claim: what distinguished Prague, in Sayer’s words, was the city’s
“extraordinary receptiveness to the modern”. Russian intellectuals got drunk
on Hegel. Czech intellectuals got drunk on Cubism and Surrealism. In the
summer of 1935, Nezval, together with his friends the Surrealist painters
Toyen and Štyrský, went to Paris to visit Breton and Éluard, to experience
again, in Nezval’s words, “the magic that had never deserted us throughout
all the days of their stay in Prague”. Nezval was as enraptured as ever by
the French capital. “Everything is like a dream”, he wrote in Ulice
Gît-le-Cœur (Gît-le-Cœur Street). Yet ill omens surrounded him: Štyrský had
a heart attack, and their stay coincided with the Communist-sponsored First
International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture. By now the
Communists’ agenda called for enforcing Socialist Realism. The French poet
René Crevel was on the organizing committee and invited Breton to speak. The
committee, whose other members included Ilya Ehrenburg, Tristan Tzara and
Breton’s one-time friend, Aragon, uninvited Breton. Crevel implored
Ehrenburg and Breton to compromise – without success. In desperation, he
repeatedly telephoned his friend Éluard, who was out partying with Nezval at
a brothel. Éluard was worried about Crevel, and asked Nezval to call him the
next morning. Nezval demurred: he was insecure about making phone calls in
his shaky French. That evening Crevel shut the windows in his apartment and
turned on the gas.

Nezval, who had been invited to the Congress as Czechoslovakia’s
representative, prepared a speech quoting Kalandra’s review of Communicating
Vessels and defending the compatibility of Communism and Surrealism. But he
was never called to the podium. He left Paris, in Sayer’s description,
knowing, if never accepting, that the gate to Moscow had been slammed shut.

After the Socialist Realist mandate came the Moscow show trials. Teige
questioned the executions of the Old Bolsheviks. Nezval remained silent.
Teige, who had been Čapek’s great ideological opponent, now became Nezval’s:
it was the late 1930s, and Czechoslovakia found itself between Hitler and
Stalin. In such conditions, Nezval believed, the Soviet regime required his
full support. In March 1938 he declared the Czechoslovak Surrealist Group
“dissolved”. Breton, distraught, urged Nezval to reconsider: the break-up of
the Czechoslovak group was a threat to the whole Surrealist movement. Breton
sided with Teige, Štyrský, Toyen, Biebl and the others. Nezval was left
alone. When he visited Paris that July he did not see Breton at all.

A decade later the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia. Kalandra, who
had so eloquently defended Surrealism’s compatibility with dialectical
materialism fifteen years earlier, was among the defendants at the show
trial of Milada Horáková, who was charged with Trotskyite conspiracy and a
plot to destroy the Czechoslovak people’s democracy, restore capitalist
exploitation and initiate a third world war. He gave an elaborate
confession. After he was sentenced to death, Kalandra requested that he be
allowed to say goodbye to his wife. Then he asked for cigarettes, soda water
and some food. Breton and Max Ernst signed a telegram appealing to the
Czechoslovak government to spare Kalandra’s life. Éluard refused to join
them. Breton wrote to him, reminding them of the time they had spent with
Kalandra in Prague fifteen years earlier: “How can you in your soul bear
such a degradation of a human being, in the person of he who was your
friend?” Éluard responded coldly: “I already have too much on my hands with
the innocent who proclaim their innocence, to occupy myself with the guilty
who proclaim their guilt”.

The following year Teige died of a heart attack. Shortly afterwards Teige’s
wife committed suicide, as did his lover, as did Biebl. By then Toyen had
fled to Paris. After Kalandra’s execution, she never spoke to Éluard again.
Yet many years later, Toyen insisted that nonetheless “Paul was always ‘one
of us’”. “As of course” – Derek Sayer confirms – “he was.”

Marci Shore is Associate Professor of History at Yale University and
the author, most recently, of The Taste of Ashes: The afterlife of
totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, which appeared last year.